Quick & Easy Halloween Gravestones

Here’s another fun DIY for our Halloween series. As Halloween approaches, we are busily trying to make fun and spooky decorations. These are super easy to do and really fun!

Last weekend we went to Salem, MA to walk around to be inspired for Halloween. We saw a memorial for the Salem Witch Trials in a very old graveyard there.

We took a lot of cool, and a little bit creepy, pictures of the gravestones for inspiration for ours! It’s really intriguing to be in such an old town, especially around Halloween. Unfortunately, it is also very busy, so we did not get to see as much as we wanted to. But, just walking the old cobblestone streets transfixed us back to a different time.

For these gravestones, all you’ll need is cardboard, scissors and/or an X-acto knife, and paint. For the cardboard we used flattened boxes, and for paint we used grey, moss green, and brown acrylic paint.

The first thing you’ll want to do is look at different designs of gravestones to get inspired. We sketched the designs onto the cardboard using a pencil and then cut them out. The simple designs are easier to cut out since cardboard can be difficult to cut, but for the more complicated designs we found the X-acto knife made life easy. Make sure you leave extra space on the sides of your gravestone to fold back so it will stand up. You could also tape a long triangle-shaped strip of cardboard to the back as a stand if you don’t want the sides folded back. Once the design was all cut out we realized they were a bit top heavy and just flopped over, to remedy this we taped a toothpick to the back where the top was flopping.

After your have your shape, start painting. We painted a base layer of grey over the whole gravestone and then added splotches of green and brown to give it more dimension. We found it good to paint a few and let them dry because once you’re inspired by spooky phrases to put on your gravestones, you’ll want to do them all at once!

We started looking online and thinking about what to write on our gravestones next. Here are the ones we used:

Barry D’Alive, 1802-1868

Can you hear me now?

Underneath lies Aubrey Jones, sadly now a bag of bones

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, here lies someone I wouldn’t trust

Myra Manes 1824-1890 by body and bones are buried down here so I will come haunt you year after year

Next we used chalk to write out the phrases. This was easier than painting, plus you can just use a paper towel or your hand to dust off mistakes. You could either use the chalk to stencil or just leave it like we did. I personally liked the look of erasing it a few times because the dusty white chalk left a nice effect.

After that you’re all ready to set up your graveyard! Comment with any other clever phrases you decide to use.